SONNET BY PETRARCH. IN HEAVEN. NE'ER did devoted mother on her son, Down-glancing from her home so bright And feeling all her old affection there. So that her present love doth far outrun The mother's or the lover's; and, from far, Nor doubt my faitnful love; Her gentle voice comes like a spirit's sigh, Thy journey will be ended soon Telling the chances that around me are; Bidding me what to seek, and what to fly; Breathing sweet peace down on this life's stern war, And raising my bowed soul up to her home on high! Tinsley's Magazine. I HAVE no wealth of grief; no sobs, no tears, May say I never loved him. Ah, not so! wet I watch the rain-drops, silent, large and few, Spectator. Shalt rest with me above! SONG THE WINDS. and thou THE South Wind sings of happy springs, And dreary coasts of barren sand; "I GO TO PREPARE A PLACE FOR THEE." For her soft warm heart is all my own. GRIEVE not-nor mourn if for a little while My face is hid from thee. Have I not told thee? Canst thou not believe? "Where I am, thou shalt be!" Where I am thou shalt be. I only go Before thee to prepare Chambers' Journal LOVE'S WAKING. Is Love a dream? In truth, they tell me so, A place for thee-where thou shalt safely dwell That tender glances, whispers sweet and low, Beyond all grief and care. Beyond all grief and care- then, is it hard For thee to trust my love? And patient wait, until Í bid thee come Thy home above these clouds, where gleam- They speak of waking from that dream, while I From The Edinburgh Review. from the fact that, on the one hand, some explanation is manifestly necessary for THE profound, although tacit, distinc- the intelligent comprehension of much of tion which the literature of the West has the Pentateuch; while on the other hand established between the principal and the those Jewish writings which are posterior complemental branches of the Jewish Law to the final arrangement of the Sacred is an anomaly without historic parallel. Books by Ezra, many of which are of inThere exists, indeed, a line of demarca- ferior authority to those of the Mishna, tion which is neither false nor shadowy; are accepted by the Churches of the West but its value has been exaggerated to a under the quaint title of Deutero-Canonidegree that is altogether disproportionate. cal. Linguistic ignorance alone can have Three great classes of Hebrew literature led men to study the Apocrypha while have been so venerated, though still im- they neglected the Talmud; but the latperfectly studied, as to yield a vital ele- ter is entombed in most crabbed Hebrew, ment of the Law, the Ethics, and even of the former books are accessible in Greek. what was formerly called the Science, of It is now six years since one of the modern Europe. The main body of gener- most important of our contemporaries al opinion, down to our own time, has been awakened an unusual degree of public atguided and informed by three foreign ele- tention by giving some account of the ments, of nearly equal weight. These are Talmud. An erudite familiarity with the devout spirit of Judea, the discursive Oriental tongues illuminated this essay, intellect of Greece, and the Law of Rome. which sparkled with the play of the The chivalry and feudality of the Teuton imagination of the writer no less than and the Celt were their own; the other with the gems which he produced from elements of their civilization are trace- the obscurity of twelve folio Hebrew able to the three sources we have indi- volumes. We learn with much regret, cated. as these sheets are passing through But while not only the Law, but the the press, that a painful disease has carearlier history, and the prophetical, poeti- ried off Mr. Deutsch, the accomplished cal, and allegorical writings of the He-author of that paper, and blighted the brew seers and princes, before the time hope that he would apply his great of the return from the Captivity of Babylon, occupy a foremost place in our veneration, that great body of judicial decisions, which bears the same relation to the Pentateuch that the decisions of our English judges hold to the Statute Book, has met with a neglect that is almost absolute. This neglect is the more marked 1. Le Talmud de Babylone, traduit en langue Fran Par l'ABBE L. CHIARINI. çaise et complété par celui de Jérusalem, et par d'autres monumens de l'antiquité judaique. Vols. I. et II. Leip2. Eighteen treatises from the Mishna. Translated by the Rev. D. A. DA SOLA and the Kev. M. J. KAPHALL. London: 1845. 3. Novum Testamentum ex Talmude et Antiquitatibus Hebræorum illustratum. J. GERHARD MEUSCHEN. Lipsiæ: 1736. 4. Tractatus de Vacca Rubrá. Ex auct. MOSES BEN MAIMON. Amstelodami: 1711. 5. Yoma. Additamenta ad Codicem de Die Expiationis. R. CHIJA. Vienna: 1744. Trad. B. powers and acquirements to a more thor- easy, that it is to be regretted that it is neither exhaustive nor accurate. Nor is it consistent with the doctrine of the Gospels. translated by Ugolin, two by Rabe, and ties of the rabbins are exhausted on the two by Edzard. Twenty-three more, second, with which Christendom has litfrom the pen of Ugolin, exist in MSS. tle concern. The reply is characterized In the British Museum are to be found by that simplicity which may often be obtranslations by Ulmann of six tracts, by served when people speak confidently on Schneidius of two, and both text and matters with which they are but supercomment of the very important treatises †ficially acquainted. The division is so Avoda Sara and Yoma - the first on "Idolatry," and the second on the "Day of Atonement." While these works are far from having exhausted this enormous field of literary treasure, they are yet For Christ Himself divided the Law enough to enable a very modest scholar-into the two branches of duty to God and ship to gain a correct idea of much that duty to man; or what we now term Reit contains. ligion and Ethics. He did so in language We may thus well put the question, Is which was the faithful echo of the Oral it rational to assume that we can fully Law. Under the former head ranked comprehend either the ancient Law of that long order of liturgic observances, the Jewish nation, or the references to, centering on the existence of the Altar, and comments on, that Law which we as- the Temple, and the Holy City, which cribe to the founders of Christianity, was committed to the guardianship of an while we are ignorant of the great mass hereditary priesthood. The greater part of comment and judicial decision which of these ordinances, by the full consent was, to the text of the Pentateuch, what of the doctors of the Law, are in abeythe sententia of our judges are to the ance during the exile of Israel from Palstatute book? Or are we in a position to estine. So fully is this the case, that the understand the most momentous refor- portions of the Talmud which relate to mation attempted within the province of sacrifice, purifications, and the ceremohistory, without being aware of the nial portions of the Law, have been negthoughts and habits, the ethics and the lected and left untranslated by many who creed, of the people among whom it orig-have approached the subject of Hebrew inated? We shall be met, no doubt, by Ethics. But such questions as the oblithe familiar remark that the ancient law was divided into the moral and the ceremonial enactments; that the former "are summarily comprehended in the ten Commandments;" and that the subtle gation of prayer, of alms, and of fasting; as the prohibitions of malediction against one's fellow, and of oppressing the hired servant or the stranger; as the duty of support and instruction which a parent owes to his children; afford instances of The old catalogue, not the new, except the last numerous ethical injunctions of the Oral named tract. ↑ A critical question of much interest arises from the very first pages of the Avoda Sara. A comparison of the Attic Calendar with the Acts of the Apostles (xvii. 33) leads to the conclusion that St. Paul was present at the festival of the OEOZENIA at Athens, on the 20th of Olympiad; (the Court of Areopagus sat three days after -v. 19). This was in direct violation of the Law, according to the Avoda Sara. So minute are the provis ions against even apparent idolatry, that no Jew was to enter an idolatrous city within three days of a festival. He was not even to remove a thorn from his foot in the presence of a statue, lest he should seem to bow before it. the month Hecatombeon, in the first year of the 207th Unless such provisions can be limited to a date posterior to the overthrow of the Jewish polity, it follows that St. Paul had, at this part of his career, emancipated himself much more thoroughly from the authority of the Law than his plea recorded in chap. xxviii. 17 would lead us to suppose. Law which are not even referred to in the Decalogue, and which are little more than intimated in the Pentateuch. As matters of daily practice, and of constant scholastic dispute among the twelve great sects into which the Jews, under the reign of the Idumean dynasty, were divided, they were brought repeatedly to the notice of Christ. Much of His recorded teaching specially relates to the contemporary controversies on these and similar points. He refers, with the utmost respect, to the Oral Law. The very language of the Mishna is employed verbatim by the writers of the New Testament. Can we imagine that we rightly understand the language which we so freely quote, while that great storehouse of doctrine, of which the new faith was, the complement and the corrective, remains to us an utterly sealed book? We may readily understand, as matter of literary history, how it came to pass that the doctors of the fourth century, and their followers and commentators, contented themselves with a very imperfect acquaintance with the subjects on which they undertook to dogmatize. But to acquiesce in a theory founded on so lame and crippled a basis is, at the present day, plainly indefensible. We are not forgetful of the labours of the German scholars, the pioneers in this as in so many other fields of study. Germany has been, as we shall show, in possession of a version of the Mishna for more than a century; and in the translation of such works as Ebrard's "Introduction to the New Testament," some knowledge of the Talmud filters into English thought. To Dr. Lightfoot's labours we have referred as exceptional. One of the most elegant and thoughtful scholars of the present day quotes the Mishna in his charming "Sinai and Palestine;" but specks of light like these only make the general darkness more visible the systematic neglect more inexcusa ble. well as heroic patience to the task, their labours are often vitiated and rendered useless by the strong prejudice under which they wrote. Thus, of one Jewish work of the fifteenth century, the Nizachon, or Victoria, of Rabbi Lipman (a work not to be found in the British Museum), John Buxtorff uses the mild and philosophic expression, quod ex ore ipsius Diaboli dictantis excepit. It is clear that a certain amount of wariness is needful in following such guides as these. In the A very brilliant and noble exception, however, is to be mentioned in the person of the Abbé L. Chiarini, Professor of Oriental Languages at the Royal University of Warsaw, and member of various learned societies. This author published at Leipzig, in the year 1831, a translation of the first treatise of the "Talmud," including both Mishna and Ghemara, that is to say, both the text of, and the ancient comment on, that portion of the Oral Law which relates to what we may familiarly term the saying one's prayers. It is necessary to use this rather puerile phrase, as, if we were to say a treatise on prayer, we might altogether mislead our readers. language of the modern English rabbins this treatise, BERACOTH, contains laws for regulating the daily prayers, and the ritual of divine worship. But, although the work is marked in the catalogue of the British The Hebrew of the Talmud is, it is true, Museum with the words "no more volumes excessively cramped and obscure. Di- published," it was, in the intention of the vines who find but little difficulty in read-author, only the commencement of the ing the original of books with which they are familiar in an English version, confess themselves entirely unable to master the dialect of the Mishna. The names of Talmudic scholars — Ugolin, Surenhuse, the Buxtorffs, Lightfoot, and one or two more may be counted on the fingers. The last-named author, the chief English student of Hebrew literature, candidly admits his inability even to conjecture the meaning of some of the passages which he sought to interpret. Research into this province of thought has been chiefly con-thodoxy should be called in question, and fined to an age of more leisure than the present. But while such men as the elder Buxtorff grudged no time to set in order their views of the" Synagoga Judaica," and brought extraordinary erudition as great task of the translation into French of the entire Talmud, involving the collation of the two distinct versions or codices, known as the Talmud of Jerusalem, and that of Babylon. The labour of the translator has completed only one out of the sixty-eight treatises of which the Talmud is composed; but he has, in a preface of 230 octavo pages, given an analytical view of the entire work, which is of high critical value. While apparently hampered, in one or two places, by the fear lest his or while taking occasion to declare, in unequivocal terms, his submission to a guide who had not at the time of that publication claimed infallibility, a general candour and impartiality pervade the prole gomena of the Abbé which are extremely | of infantile tenderness, of far-seeing pru rare inany writing connected in any way dence, fall from the lips of venerable with Judaism. sages. Fairy tales, for Sunday evenings' recital, go back to early days when there were giants in the land; or those, yet earlier, when, as Josephus tells us, man had a common language with the animals. Mr. Darwin might write a new book illustrative of a prehistoric common ancestry, from the fables of Syria, India, and Greece, that tell of animal wisdom. From the glorious liturgy of the Temple, Rome and her daughters have stolen almost all that is sublime in their own, with the one exception of the Hymn of St. Ambrose, itself formed on a Jewish model. Page after page might be filled with such language and such thought as does not flow from modern pens. Yet the possessor of these inviting spoils would know but little of the real character of the Talmud. The Talmud may be said to be reproduced in the pages of the famous Moses Ben Maimon, among whose voluminous works are fourteen books containing eighty-nine treatises of the Mishna Hathora, or Lex Secunda; a work that has led to the application to its author of the title of the Second Moses. The literary style of Maimonides is such as to render the study of his works far less repulsive than that of the earlier rabbins. But the authoritative tone in which he speaks, his contempt of the usual deference paid to authority, and the unmistakable errors that may be detected in some of his most positive assertions, tend to deter serious scholars from implicitly following so selfasserting a guide. Maimonides was a native of Cordova. He travelled into Burgundy in search of a copy of the Law. Among his works the More Nevochim, or Doctor Perplexorum, the Yad Chazekah, or Strong Hand, and the treatise on the Resurrection, may be cited as the most noted. He travelled into Egypt in 1177,-confined in some cases to the singular and wrote his tract on the Resurrection in 1186. His nobly worded creed is yet canonical among the people of his faith. He died, at the age of 73, in A.D. 1204. The title of the Novum Testamentum ex Talmude illustratum. by Meuschen, is such as to warrant an eager search for this rare book. But the student will be disappointed in its perusal. It is devoid of literary merit or philosophic grasp, although not deficient in erudition. The original plan appears to have been soon abandoned by the author; as the illustrations of the genealogy contained in the first Gospel, from the idlest and least readable portions of the Ghemara, occupy nearly half the work. The details involved in this illustration may be well described by the text which speaks of the "filthy dreamers" who "defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities." Any attempt to illustrate the infancy of Christianity from the ethics and opinions of the people who were the first Christians will be sought for in vain in Meuschen. No less practicable would it be to stray with an opposite intention, and to extract venom, instead of honey, from the flowers that seem to spring up in self-sown profusion. Fierce, intolerant, vindictive hatred for mankind, with small exception number; idle subtlety, frittering away at once the energy of the human intellect and the dignity of the divine law; pride and self-conceit amounting to insanity; adulation that hails a man covered with the rags of a beggar as Saint, and Prince, and King; indelicacy pushed to a grossness that renders what it calls virtue more hateful than the vice of more modest people; all these might be strung together in one black Paternoster, and yet they would give no more just an idea of the Talmud than would the chaplets of its lovelier flowers. For both are there, and more. These folio volumes comprise the intellectual life of a gifted people for the period of 800 years - a self-tormenting, mournful, misdirected life. But it is a life needful to be understood by all those who would really know what Christianity was in her cradle, and would thus discern both what that Faith historically is, and how it has gradually assumed its present form-"If form," indeed, "that might be called which form has none." It has proved a grateful and not unre- Little cause have we to wonder that the warded task to wander through the Jew, as he glances from the triple tiara mazes of the Talmud, and to cull flowers that claims to crown and dominate Chrisyet sparkling with the very dew of Eden. tendom, to the rags of conventional and Figures in shining garments haunt its only nominal Christianity still retained recesses. Prayers of deep devotion, by the disciples of masters whom we sublime confidence, and noble benedic- need not name (in Germany, in France, tion, echo in its ancient tongue. Senti- and in England), should yet cling to the ments of lofty courage, of high resolve, linen, pure and white, of the priesthood |